International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 06 Issue: 07 | July 2019
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Elderly Care-Taking and Fall Detection System
Ankita Sawant1, Samrat Thorat2
1Student,
Dept. of Electronics Engineering, GCOEA, Maharashtra, India
Dept. of Electronics Engineering, GCOEA, Maharashtra, India
---------------------------------------------------------------------***---------------------------------------------------------------------2Professor,
Abstract - Rapid aging of global population is the topic of
concern, which makes the issue of elderly care increasingly
important. Falls of old people is the biggest reason for deaths
among elderly together with forgetting intake of prescribed
medication. Detection of fall is a leading challenge in public
health problems particularly among elder people. These kinds
of falls may become fatal if remain overlooked in time. Thus to
avoid such accidents and provide medical help in case of such
emergency, fall detection system is built. To minimize the fall
and its related injuries continuous examination of patients and
those who are prone to fall is needed. The given thesis presents
Elderly care taking system which detects falls using wearable
accelerometer sensors ADXL345 embedded in Raspberry pi
with the help of ANN-based algorithm. Also medication system
which sets a reminder for proper intake of medicines and a
system for keeping check on physiological functionalities.
Key Words: Fall detection system, Wearable Devices,
Artificial Intelligence, Accelerometer
1. INTRODUCTION
Elderly are unable to manage their daily actions
as they grow older which results in one of the threats in
public health issue. According to report from World Health
Organization (WHO) adults, with age greater than 65 years,
experience the utmost total of fatal falls, also the deaths
caused by falls are maximum among elderly specially over
the 60 years of age[1]. Females have been found at greater
risk in this issue[2]. Following figure is more concerning
since falls happen frequently indoors and are associated to
daily activities. Not only physical, but these fall could also
result in severe psychological effects in elderly. This could
cause increase in dependence from elderly. Unnoticed falls
occurs more often when patient goes to the toilet. Unassisted
fall can negatively impact their health. The time required to
provide patient proper treatment after the fall determines
the severity of a fall. Also, as the age of elderly increases,
they are likely to overlook things which results in safety
issues for them. In that context, health troubles of the elderly
have become increasingly vital and falls are the most
frequent accidents which may often require medical
consideration. So, elderly caretaking, recording their
medication and fall detection is noteworthy research
direction.
To distinguish a fall from other actions based on
this definition requires lots of efforts, since there are many
similar actions. For example, falling has the most
resemblance to lying [3]. Furthermore it is quite difficult to
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obtain the real statistics in the daily life, since it is a kind of
random and accidental. Therefore this is an intimidating task
to build datasets with real fall data for study and analysis.
Researchers have gone through lots of work in this field till
2019. The rapid advancement in the area of smart sensors
and the Internet of Things has brought various opportunities
in fall detection research and created series of research
results.
The main objective is to design a system for
elderly care-taking by keeping track of intake of their
medication, daily activities and emergency situation like falls
with the help accelerometer, pulse rate sensor with the help
of Raspberry Pi and IoT. The detection of falls by classifying
these from other daily activities is focused. For this ANN
based model of ML is used.
The remaining paper has been organized as given
further: Section II consists of literature Review of fall
detection system. Section methodology of given system.
Performance analysis with results is given in section IV.
Finally, section V summarized the paper and discusses the
foremost challenges in research and development in the field
of elderly caretaking.
2.
LITERATURE REVIEW
For elderly fall detection, several solutions have
been suggested since last decades. Based on the used sensortechnology, these solutions are classified into three core
categories: Wearable Systems (WS), Non-Wearable Systems
(NWS), and hybrid based Systems (FS). In NWS systems
vision based devices is used which is robust and powerful for
detecting falls. In [16] a real-time human fall detection
system using static digital camera which is fixed in the
indoor of respective elderly is proposed. The proposed work
is based on two techniques, an Ellipse approximation (EA)
and Motion History Image (MHI). Nevertheless, the foremost
drawback of these kinds of vision systems is their high cost
and lacks of privacy for patient since these systems require
the sensors that need to be located in the indoor
surroundings where the elderly lives.
To overcome this drawback, WS systems has
been proposed, [6], [7], [9], [10], [11], [13] which typically
utilize inertial sensors such as gyroscopes and
accelerometer, generally mounted on the body of elderly in
order to record the fall. Generally, in WS systems
accelerometers are used since they recommend advantages
such as low cost, low weight, low power consumption, small
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International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 06 Issue: 07 | July 2019
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
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size, ease of operation, can be attached on the various body
locations and, most importantly, portability. As a result, one
of the most frequently used method for fall detection
involves the use of a tri-axial accelerometer along with a
threshold-based algorithm. These papers used various
locations for placement of these sensors like shoes, chest,
and stomach on belt or on palm. Given work use the concept
of thresholding in order to identify the fall. Less computation
cost and complexity are one of the biggest advantages while
using the threshold-based methods rather than other
methods.
and fall, our bodies are easy to dump to a certain direction,
which causes our certain part of bodies to touch and hit the
ground until our bodies render a quiescent state. There are
four falling postures included in this study, i.e. frontal fall,
back fall, left fall, right fall.
However, thresholding method is not adequate
for detecting variety of falls since the system needs to find
certain threshold for each kind of fall. Generally the system
misinterprets the falls with ADL. Lately, machine learning
(ML) techniques have been projected on WS systems to deal
with these shortcomings and improve fall detection
accuracy. Statistical inference of data models is used in ML
for making automated predictions.
Given paper follow the similar approach using a
ANN-based model for fall detection, but the construction of
system is in different way. First of all, data of actions of
elderly is captured by a 3D-axis accelerometer ADXL345.
Then, the elderly fall is determined by a ANN-based system,
which is built and trained on raspberry pi. Primarily, the
system training is done using past information from datasets
of falls. Subsequently, system detects the fall events learning
by the trained model.
3. METHODOLOGY
The present system consists of two blocks:
1.
2.
Intelligent Medibox for recording the regular
intake of medication.
Fall Detection (FD) system to detect the fall.
The proposed system consists of four major
components: accelerometer, a Smart IoT gateway,
communication network and Cloud services.
For this purpose, a 3-axis accelerometer, pulse rate
and IR proximity sensors are used, which are responsible for
assembling data from engagements of elderly person in realtime with the help of Raspberry Pi 3B+. Raspberry Pi 3
Model B+ is a 64-bit quad core processor running at 1.4GHz,
dual-band 2.4GHz and 5GHz wireless LAN, Bluetooth
4.2/BLE, faster Ethernet. A 3D-axis accelerometer ADXL345
captures the data from activities of elderly. Given
accelerometer is a thin, small, low power and has high
resolution measurement at up to 16 g. formation of digital
output data is in16-bit two complement and is accessed
using I2C digital interface. Acceleration is measured in gforce, i.e. acceleration due to weight. Thus on free body it is
measured 1G vertically. When the subject lose the balance
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Fig -1: Block Diagram of proposed system
To recognize the four falling postures, a machine
learning technique is employed. In given research, the neural
network classifier is developed to decide the correct activity.
Neuron is the basic element of a neural network. This is a
simple mechanism that aggregates many inputs and applies
a nonlinear transfer function, and generates the result as a
model prediction. Many neurons of this kind are connected
in a organized way to form a neural network. The neurons in
such networks are arranged in layers. Typically, there is one
layer for input neurons, one or more layers of the hidden
layers, and one layer for output neurons.
Each layer is fully interconnected to the preceding
layer and the following layer. The links between neurons
have given specific weight, to determine the strength of
influence one neuron has on another. The information flow
starts at input layer through the processing layers and ends
at output layer to generate predictions. The weights are
adjusted during training in order to equal predictions at the
target values; the network learns to generate better and
better predictions. Back propagation method is used for
adjusting the weight and correcting the error.
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International Research Journal of Engineering and Technology (IRJET)
e-ISSN: 2395-0056
Volume: 06 Issue: 07 | July 2019
p-ISSN: 2395-0072
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Fig -4: Process flow schematic of fall detection system
Fig -2: Training Algorithm Fig -3: Testing Algorithm
The activation values from receptor neuron is
passed further, which are then weighted and summed up to
the output neuron,
OK =  Wjk aj
The output weights Wjk are trained in a manner similar to
the training of a two-layer back-propagation network. First
of all some random value is initialized to the weights in
range (-0.001<wij <0.001), and then they are updated at each
cycle by the formula,
wjk(t) = wjk(t -1) + Wjk(t)
If a fall is determined, the system checks heart rate of the
patient to make sure of the fall. If the result is positive or
there is inconsistency in consumption of medicines an alert
is set off and the system automatically reacts by sending
notifications to the care takers of elderly people. Finally, the
system built on cloud provides services. Additionally a new
model is built using the data of fall detected.
4. PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS
10 healthy volunteers contributed in the study of age 20
to 25 years old, weight 50 to 70 kg and height 161 to 181 cm.
Each participant wore the system on the belt of his jeans and
repeated 5 times a sequence of tasks (moving upstairs,
moving downstairs, walking, running, standing, fall forward,
fall backward, fall right, fall left, lying, sitting).The number of
hidden layers is 5. The Data acquitted from accelerometer
and pulse rate sensor is given to the raspberry pi where it is
analyzed to detect the fall. ANN model is formed using Sci Kit
tool.
The change value is calculated as
Wjk(t) = l1(rk -Ok)ai + aWjk(t -1)
which is analogous to the formula used in the backpropagation method.
Additionally, the system has reminder system for
elderly which is made by IR proximity sensor. The Intelligent
Medibox setup has a box separated into several
compartments, with attached IR. The box is connected to a
real time clock, a Raspberry Pi B3+ which processes the
activities and accordingly displays the pill details and time of
intake to caregivers In case the person fails in intake of
medication IR receiver will sense it and send the signal to
system.
Chart -1: Fault analysis
model for sleeping case
Chart -2: Fault analysis
model for walking case
Chart -3: Fault analysis model for falling case
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Chart 1 to 3 illustrates the values of acceleration in
x, y, z axis with respect to time using accelerometer. Above
graph concludes that for sleeping there is less deviation in
acceleration, while falling sudden change in acceleration
occurs which is helpful in determining fall. The value
acquired through accelerometer is analyzed through ANN
model which thereby detect the fall. When the fall happens
or person forgot to take medicines certain message is posted
on the twitter account of patient. Everyone who follows him
is able to see that message as given in fig. 7. Thus the patient
could get the emergency treatment.
rescuing, but it cannot prevent the human from being
injured. We have attempted and achieved good performance
of predicting a fall before an elderly person is injured
(hitting the door) using one existing health care dataset.
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Fig -5: Notification as shown in caregiver’s phone
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5. CONCLUSION
Reliable fall prevention or notification after
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